The Drowning Pool

by Ross Macdonald

Paying no attention to her winnings, she crossed to the bar and took the seat beside me. He gave her a double whisky in a shot-glass without being asked.

  “You pick it up, Simmie.” Her voice had a trace of weary coquetry. “I’m wearing a girdle.”

  “Sure, but I don’t need to count them. I’ll give you the twenty-five.”

  “I put thirty-five in.” The double shot went down like water down a drain.

  “That’s the percentage, kid. You got to pay something for all the fun you get.”

  “Yeah, fun.” She folded the twenty and the five he gave her, and tucked them away in her bag.

  A newsboy came in with an armful of Evening Review-Journal’s and I bought one. The third page carried the story I was looking for, under the heading: EX-MARINE SOUGHT IN NOPAL VALLEY DEATH. It gave no information I didn’t have, except that the police were maintaining an open mind as to the cause of death. Accompanying the story was a picture of Reavis, smiling incongruously over the caption: WANTED FOR QUESTIONING.

  I folded the paper open at the third page and laid it on the bar between me and the big synthetic blonde. She didn’t notice it for a minute or two; she was watching the bartender gather up her jackpot. Then her gaze strayed back to the bar and saw the picture, took hold of it. The breath wheezed asthmatically in her nostrils, and stopped entirely for a period of seconds. She took a pair of spectacles from her bag. With them on her face, she looked oddly like a schoolteacher gone astray.

  “You mind if I look at your paper?” she asked me huskily. There was more south in her voice than there had been before.

  “Go ahead.”

  The bartender looked up from sorting the slugs and quarters on the bar. “Say, I didn’t know you wore glasses, Elaine. Very becoming.”

  She didn’t hear him. With the aid of a scarlet-tipped finger moving slowly from word to word, she was spelling out the newspaper story to herself. When the slow finger reached the final period, she was silent and still for an instant. Then she said aloud: “Well I’ll be—!”

  She flung the paper down, its edges crumpled by the moist pressure of her hands, and went to the street door. Her hips rolled angrily, her high heels spiked the floor. The screen door slammed behind her.

  I waited thirty seconds and went after her. Rotating on his stool, the desolate youth followed me with his eyes, like a stray dog I had befriended and betrayed.

  “Stick around,” I told him over my shoulder.

  The woman was already halfway up the block. Though they were hobbled by her skirt, her legs were moving like pistons. The gray foxtail hung down her back, fluttering nervously. I followed her more slowly when I saw where she was going. She went up the outside stairs of the Rush Apartments, unlocked the second door, and went in, leaving it open. I crossed the street and slid behind the wheel of my car.

  She came out immediately. Something metallic in her hand caught a ray of sunlight. She pushed it into her bag as she came down the stairs. The forgotten glasses on her face gave it a purposeful air. I hid my face behind a road map.

  She crossed the parking lot to an old Chevrolet sedan. Its original blue paint had faded to brownish green. The fenders were crumpled and dirty like paper napkins on a restaurant table. The starter jammed, the exhaust came out in spasms of dark blue smoke. I followed the pillar of smoke to the main highway junction in the middle of town, where it turned south towards Boulder City. I let it get well ahead as we passed out of town onto the open highway.

  Between Boulder City and the dam an asphalt road turned off to the left toward Lake Mead, skirting the public beaches along the shore. Children were playing on the gravel below the road, splashing in the shallow waveless water. Further out a fast red hydroplane was skittering back and forth like a waterbug, describing esses on the paper-flat, paper-gray surface.

  The Chevrolet turned off the blacktop, to the left again, up a gravel road which wound through low scrub oak. The brush and the innumerable branching lanes made an accidental maze. I had to move up on the woman to keep her in sight. She was too busy holding her car on the road to notice me. Her smooth old tires skidded and ground among the loose stones as she came out of one curve only to enter another.

  We passed a public camping-ground where families were eating in the open among parked cars, tents, tear-drop trailers. A few hundred yards further on, the Chevrolet left the gravel road, turning up a brush-crowded lane which was no more than two ruts in the earth. Seconds later, I heard its motor stop.

  I left my car where it was and went up the lane on foot. The Chevrolet was parked in front of a small cabin faced with peeled saplings. The woman tried the screen door, found it locked, pounded it with her fist.

  “What gives?” It was Reavis’s voice, coming from inside the cabin.

  I crouched behind a scrub-oak, feeling as if I should be wearing a coonskin cap.

  Reavis unhooked the door and stepped outside. His hounds-tooth suit was dusty, and creased in all the wrong places. His hair curled down in his eyes. He pushed it back with an irritable hand. “What’s the trouble, sis?”

  “You tell me, you lying little crumb.” He overshadowed her by half a head, but her passionate energy made him look helpless. “You told me you were having woman trouble, so I said I’d hide you out. You didn’t tell me that the woman was dead.”

  He stalled for time to think: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Elaine. Who’s dead? This dame I was talking about isn’t dead. She’s perfectly okay only she says she’s missed two months in a row and I don’t want any part of it. She was cherry.”

  “Yeah, a grandmother and cherry.” Her voice rasped with ugly irony. “This is one thing you can’t lie out of, sprout. You’re in too deep for me to try and help you. I wouldn’t help you even if I could. You can go to the gas chamber and I wouldn’t lift a finger to save your neck. Your neck ain’t worth the trouble to me or to anybody else.”

  Reavis whined and whimpered: “What the hell are you talking about, Elaine. I didn’t do nothing wrong. Are the police after me?”

  “You know damn well they are. This time you’re going to get it, sonny boy. And I want no part of it unnerstan’? I want no part of you from now on.”

  “Come on now, Elaine, settle down. That’s no kind of talk to use on your little brother.” He forced his voice into an ingratiating rhythm and put one hand on her shoulder. She shook it off and held her purse in both hands.

  “You can save it. You’ve talked me into too much trouble in my life. Ever since you stole that dollar bill from maw’s purse and tried to shift it onto me, I knew you were heading for a bad end.”

  “You’ve done real good for yourself, Elaine. Selling it for two-bits in town on Saturday night before you was out of pigtails. You still charging for it, or do you pay them?”

  The concussion of her palm against his cheek cracked like a twenty-two among the trees. His fist answered the blow, thudding into her neck. She staggered, and her sharp heels gouged holes in the sandy earth. When she recovered her balance, the gun was in her hand.

  Reavis looked at it uncomprehendingly, and took a step toward her. “You don’t have, to go off your rocker. I’m sorry I hit you, Elaine. Hell, you hit me first.”

  Her whole body was leaning and focused on the gun: the handle of a door that had always resisted her efforts, and still resisted. “Stay away from me,” Her low whisper buzzed like a rattler’s tail. “I’ll put you on the Salt Lake highway and I never want to see you again in my life. You’re a big boy now, Pat, big enough to kill people. Well, I’m a big enough girl.”

  “You got me all wrong, sis.” But he stayed where he was, his hands loose and futile at his sides. “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

  “You lie. You’d kill me for the gold in my teeth. I seen you going through my purse this afternoon.”

  He laughed shortly. “You’re crazy. I’m loaded, sis, I could put you on easy street.” He reached for his left hip pocket.

  “Keep your hands where I can see
them,” she said.

  “Don’t be crazy, I want to show you—”

  The safety clicked. The door that had resisted her was about to open. Her whole body bent tensely over the gun. Reavis’s hands rose from his side of their own accord, like huge brown butterflies. He looked sullen and stupid in the face of death.

  “Are you coming?” she said. “Or do you want to die? You’re wanted by the cops, they wouldn’t even touch me if I killed you. What loss would it be to anybody? You never gave nothing but misery to a single soul since you got out of the cradle.”

  “I’ll go along, Elaine.” His nerve had broken, suddenly and easily. “But you’ll be sorry, I warn you. You don’t know what you’re doing. Anyway, you can put away that gun.”

  I wasn’t likely to get a better cue. I stepped from behind my tree with my gun ready. “A good idea. Drop the gun, Mrs. Schneider. You, Reavis, keep up your hands.”

  Her whole body jerked. “Augh!” she said viciously. The small bright automatic fell from her hand, rustled and gleamed in the leaves in front of her feet.

  Reavis glanced at me, the color mounting floridly in his face. “Archer?”

  I said: “The name is Leatherstocking.”

  He turned on his sister: “So you had to bring a cop along, you had to wreck everything?”

  “What if I did?” she growled.

  “Hold it, Reavis.” I picked up the woman’s gun. “And you, Mrs. Schneider, go away.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “This isn’t question period. I could haul you in for accessory. Now go away, before I change my mind.”

  I kept my gun on Reavis, dropped hers into the pocket of my jacket. She turned awkwardly on her heels and went to the Chevrolet, her hard face kneaded by the first indications of regret at what she had done.

  chapter 16

  When she was gone, I told Reavis to turn his back. Terror yanked at his mouth and pulled it open. “You ain’t going to shoot me?”

  “Not if you stand still.”

  He turned slowly, reluctantly, trying to watch me over his shoulder. He carried no gun. A rectangular package bulged in his right hip pocket. He started when I unbuttoned the pocket, then held himself tense and still as I drew out the package. It was wapped in brown paper. A melancholy sigh of pain and loss came out of him, as if I had removed a vital organ. I tore one end of the paper with my teeth, and saw the corner of a thousand-dollar bill.

  “You don’t have to bother to count it,” Reavis said thickly. “It’s ten grand. Can I turn around now?”

  I stepped back, slipping the torn package into the inside breast pocket of my jacket. “Turn around slowly, hands on the head. And tell me who’d pay you ten thousand dollars for bumping off an old lady with a weak heart.”

  He turned, his blank face twisting, trying to get the feel of a story to tell. His fingers scratched unconsciously in his hair. “You got me wrong, I wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “If it was big enough to bite back, you wouldn’t.”

  “I never had nothing to do with that death. It must of been an accident.”

  “And it was pure coincidence you were on the spot when it happened.”

  “Yeah, pure coincidence.” He seemed grateful for the phrase. “I just went out to say goodbye to Cathy, I thought she might come along with me, even.”

  “Be glad she didn’t. You’d be facing a Mann Act charge as well as a murder rap.”

  “Murder rap, hell. They can’t pin murder on an innocent man. She’ll give me an alibi. I was with her before you picked me up.”

  “Where were you with her?”

  “Out in front of the house, in one of the cars.” It sounded to me as if he was telling the truth: Cathy had been sitting in my car when I went out. “We used to sit out there and talk,” he added.

  “About your adventures on Guadalcanal?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “All right, so that’s your story. She wouldn’t go along with you, but she gave you ten grand as a souvenir of your friendship.”

  “I didn’t say she gave it to me. It’s my own money.”

  “Chauffeurs make big money nowadays. Or is Gretchen just one of a string that pays you a percentage?”

  He studied me with narrowed eyes, obviously shaken by my knowledge of him. “It’s my own money,” he repeated stubbornly. “It’s clean money, nothing illegal about it.”

  “Maybe it was clean before you touched it. It’s dirty money now.”

  “Money is money, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you two grand. Twenty per cent, that’s a good percentage.”

  “You’re very generous. But I happen to have it all, a hundred percent.”

  “All right, five grand then. It’s my money, don’t forget, I promoted it myself.”

  “You tell me how you did it, then maybe I’ll cut you in. But the story has to be a good one.”

  He thought that over for a while, and finally made up his mind. “I’m not talking.”

  “We’re wasting time, then. Let’s get moving.”

  “Where you think you’re taking me?”

  “Back to Nopal Valley. The Chief of Police wants some of your conversation.”

  “We’re in Nevada,” he said. “You got to extradite me and you got no evidence.”

  “You’re coming to California for your health. Voluntarily.” I raised the barrel of my gun and let him look into the muzzle.

  It frightened him, but he wasn’t too frightened to talk. “You think you’re riding high, and you think you’re going to keep my money. All you’re gonna do is get caught in a big machine, man.”

  His face was moist and pallid with malevolence. For less than a day he had been rich and free. I’d tumbled him back into the small time, perhaps into the shadow of the gas chamber.

  “You’re going to take a ride in a little one. And don’t try for a break, Reavis, or you’ll limp the rest of your life.”

  He told me to do an impossible thing, but he came along quietly to my car. “You drive,” I said. “I haven’t had a chance to look at the scenery.”

  He drove angrily but well. We passed his sister just out of Boulder City. Nobody waved at anybody. We lost her in no time at all.

  Back in Las Vegas, I directed him to the Green Dragon. He looked at me questioningly as he pulled up to the curb.

  “We’re picking up a friend of mine. You come in, too.”

  I slid out under the wheel, on his side, and crowded him with the gun in my pocket as we crossed the sidewalk to the screen door. I couldn’t trust Reavis to drive across the desert without an accident. I couldn’t risk driving myself.

  The place looked more cheerful with the lights on, more people at the bar. The redheaded boy was sitting on the same stool, probably with the same empty beer glass in front of him, as desolate as ever.

  I called him to the door. He said hello with a surprised inflection, and heaved up a feeble smile from the bottom of his stomach.

  “Can you drive fast?”

  “The fastest crate I ever drove would only go ninety, downhill.”

  “That’s fast enough. I’ll give you ten dollars to drive me back to the coast. Me and my friend. I’m Archer.”

  “To L.A.?” He said it as if there were really angels there.

  “Nopal Valley. We go back over the mountains. From there you can take a bus.”

  “Swell. My name is Bud Musselman, by the way.” He turned to Reavis with his hand outstretched. Reavis suggested what he should do with it.

  “Pay no attention to him,” I told the boy. “He suffered a very heavy financial loss.”

  Musselman took the wheel, with Reavis beside him. I sat in the back of the convertible, my gun on my knees. The downtown streets were brightening into tunnels of colored light under the darkening sky. Its quick nightly tumescence was turning Las Vegas into a city again. Far behind to the east a slice of moon floated low in the twilit sky.

  I caught glimpses of it over my shoulder, ove
r the shoulders of mountains, as it slowly rose in the sky, dissolving smaller. The boy drove fast and hard, and no car passed us. I stopped him at a gas station in the middle of the desert. A battered sign advertised Free Zoo: Real live rattlesnakes.

  “You still got a third of a tank,” he told me eagerly. “We’re making good mileage, considering the speed.”

  “I have a phone call to make.”

  Reavis had wedged himself in the corner by the door and gone to sleep. One arm was over his face, the fist clenched tight. I reached across him and pushed the hand away from his wet forehead. He sobbed in his sleep, then opened his eyes, blinking in the light of the dash.

  “We there already?” he asked me sullenly.

  “Not yet. I’m going to phone Knudson. Come along.”

  Getting out of the car, he walked on loose knees around the gas pumps toward the open glaring door of the office. He looked round at the desert, chiaroscuroed with moon shadows; stole a glance at me, and tensed for movement halfway between the gas pumps and the door. A hunted man in a bad movie, about to risk his two-dimensional life.

  I said: “I’m right behind you. My gun is pointed at your hambone.”

  His knees went loose again. I got change from the attendant and put in a call to the Nopal Valley police station. Reavis leaned beside the wall telephone, yawning with frustration, so close to me I could smell him. His odor was a foolish hope gone sour.

  A metallic voice rasped in my left ear: “Nopal Valley police.”

  “Chief Knudson, please.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “Can you tell me where to reach him?”

  “Can’t do that. Who’s speaking?”

  “Lewis Archer. Knudson asked me to report to him.”

  “Archer. Oh, yeah.” A pause. “You got anything to report?”

  “Yes. To Knudson.”

  “He ain’t here, I tell you. This is the desk. You can report to me, and we’ll take care of it.”

  “All right,” I said reluctantly. “Get in touch with Knudson, tell him I’m coming into town tonight with a prisoner. What time is it now?”

  “Five to nine. You on the Slocum case?”